Gaia Project Agrees To Google Cease and Desist 323
Dreben writes "Gaia, an opensource project to develop a 3D API to Google Earth, has decided to comply with a request from Google. The search giant's Chief Technologist, Michael Jones, contacted the project with a request to cease and desist from all past, present and future development of the Gaia project. Amongst other things, they cited 'improper usage of licensed data,' which Google licenses from assorted third party vendors. They are going so far as to request anyone who has ever downloaded any aspect of Gaia to purge all related files. From the post to the freegis-l mail list: 'We understand and respect Google's position on the case, so we've removed all downloads from this page and we ask everybody who have ever downloaded gaia 0.1.0 and prior versions to delete all files concerned with the project, which include source code, binary files and image cache (~/.gaia).' How does such a request, likely to have turned into a demand, affect fair usage? While the API is intended to interface with the the Google Earth service, Google Earth is nothing without the data. Yet at the same time, Google openly publishes their own API which uses the same data in the same manner."
I don't get it either (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I don't get it either (Score:5, Funny)
Sure, so long as you let us keep the time machine after we've complied!
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And It is a different concept from Slashdot linking to a"news" story with some comentary then discusing it later then someone using someone elses service as a feature of thier website to promote thier conference.
Now the bigest
Buy a GPS, write some standards (Score:3, Informative)
GE is neat but the main innovation it offers is ready access to large volume of base data.
Xix.
Re:I don't get it either (Score:5, Insightful)
The data available through Google is not free-as-in-beer. There's no usage fee, but Google doesn't own the data, and they are only defending what they paid for. I would suspect that if these third-party data providers saw that Google wasn't defending their license agreement, they would jack Google's data fees or revoke their license altogether, thus ruining it for everyone, not just those of the Gaia project. Sometimes killing one project is worth it, even if it sucks for some of us.
I'm sure if Google had their own satellites and collected the data themselves and could use it any way they pleased, we would be in a slightly different situation: Google would simply hire the Gaia developers and make a slick product out of it.
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Licensing! (Score:4, Insightful)
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*nod* I was initially thinking that if gaim wasn't in the wrong for using the Oscar protocol to talk to AIM servers, then the Gaia people couldn't be in the wrong either. I still don't think they're exactly in the wrong. But I do feel that the proper thing for them to do is agree to Google's terms precisely because the data Google is serving up is not licensed for the use Gaia is putting it to. Essentially they are being nice and helping Google honor agreements it has made with third parties.
OTOH, I d
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Well, maybe you need to read up on the effects from licensing third party data then.
If you'd work for a company under special agreements to use third party databases, you'd have a much easier time understanding Google's actions.
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How about Google News? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How about Google News? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Like someone else mentioned, delisting is an option for anyone who wants it.
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-Restil
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If Google were contacting or somehow interfering with site owners, your analogy would make sens
wow, tough request (Score:5, Funny)
Hopefully google will let the developers use the google time machine to go back and not work on it.
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Qua? (Score:5, Insightful)
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matter of time (Score:4, Insightful)
I, for one, am pleased to walk down the streets of Belgrade and see "Nike" shoes for 5 dollars (US) and slipstreamed copies of Windows XP professional SP2 for less than that. I've made the decision to circumvent the laws of Intellectual Property whenever I can. I look forward to the whole thing blowing up and a new model taking its place (even though there's a chance it could be a worse model).
The direction IP law is taking us goes to a very bad place.
Re:matter of time (Score:4, Insightful)
i think you'd turn to those same IP laws you violate for protection. but then when they see that you ignore them when it suits you, you'd be SOL.
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I'm glad, for example, to see that more groups are performing live in response to the widespread copying of their recordings. Now, if you just cut out the record companies, there's still a profit to be
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It's not Google's data, and it's not free as in speech. If Google had their own satellites and put their own images on Google E
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Re:Qua? (Score:4, Insightful)
Google is not making the data freely available -- it is encrypted and can (ordinarily) only be accessed from within Google software or within the Google network through a passkey. It is as if you had some private banking information stored on an ftp server. The server is connected to the internet. Does that mean it's up for grabs? Would you like for someone to crack your password? Would you like for them to share that information with others?
Secondly, there is no indication in the letter that Google is preventing users from using the content. They are merely trying to regulate it, just as you must regulate any resource. There is not even the threat of a lawsuit. More likely Google would just change their protocols and make people jump through more hoops to get at the data. Is that to anyone's advantage?
Imagine you own a toy store. You have a large free candy dispenser outside your store window set up so that people can sample sweets throughout the day, in the hope of luring in customers. After a few weeks, a woman named Gaia comes by and figures out how to jerry-rig the dispenser so that she can get an unlimited quantity of candy for free all at once. She sets up a table in the public park with the candy she's taken from your dispenser and just gives it out to people, no charge. That's nice of her, being so generous, but it's really at your expense. Soon after, you're forced to take down your dispenser.
That's what's wrong with your argument.
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Re:Qua? (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to work for one of the companies named in those watermarks, who provides GIS datasets of the US and a few other countries. They purchase datasets from smaller companies/localities and merge and improve them to provide data to Google, in-car nav companies, and routing for businesses. One dataset that we had purchased from a county government cost the company $30,000. Almost all of the datasets required the company to agree to a Data Usage Agreement. Every street, water, rail, etc. segment that was modified in our database was tagged with the source of the data. I designed the database that cataloged those datasets, imagery, and maps to record the restrictions of each dataset. I was not privy to our sales contracts, but I would assume sales to Google involved passing along many of the same Data Usage Agreements, for a much larger amount of data and of course a much larger sum of money.
And our work probably wasn't nearly as expensive as sending satellites into space like the data from Space Imaging. Their Data Usage Agreements are likely even more limiting, and their data more expensive. My former employer buys satellite images from Space Imaging and more accurate aerial imagery from USGS flyovers to improve the accuracy of their GIS datasets, but they do not produce or distribute the images themselves.
Google did the right thing in abiding by the contracts they signed to license the data from companies like mine. We are already fortunate enough that Google absorbs the cost of that data to provide it through their API like they do, and that Google even managed to negotiate a contract allowing its use through their API.
google should have turned a blind eye. (Score:4, Interesting)
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It sucks, but that's what happens when you're dealing with licensed data.
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Re:google should have turned a blind eye. (Score:5, Informative)
I'm on the Google Earth team and yes, this is exactly what happened. The license we have to the imagery forbids us from allowing access from unofficial clients. The data providers take this very seriously indeed and noticed very quickly that such an application was out in the wild.
Fortunately, the Gaia author understood our position and ceased development, for which we are grateful. I think we are going to send him a T-Shirt or something to try and make up for it. It's a small gesture but we don't want him to think badly of us.
I guess some people will see this action as us dumping on the little guy, but it's not that simple. Many Googlers have a background in open source and have been on both sides of the fence. However, the fact remains that this sort of aerial imagery is not only very expensive to produce but also very expensive to manipulate and merge into a unified "Earth". If we allowed open source clients to access the Earth database it would be easier to dump the (unwatermarked) images en-masse and avoid paying the imagery owners for it. Clearly, that's not something anybody wants - satellites don't launch themselves.
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AC (parent) posted:
I'm on the Google Earth team and yes, this is exactly what happened. The license we have to the imagery forbids us from allowing access from unofficial clients. The data providers take this very seriously indeed and noticed very quickly that such an application was out in the wild.
Fortunately, the Gaia author understood our position and ceased development, for which we are grateful. I think we are going to send him a T-Shirt or something to try and
Re:google should have turned a blind eye. (Score:4, Funny)
Which is probably just as well in the long run. :-)
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This isn't a grey area. A grey area would be someone writing a page which hooks into Google's API. This bypasses Google's and substitute
It's Not Google's Data (Score:5, Insightful)
What if it was Microsoft instead of Google? (Score:3, Insightful)
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If google does enough things that shifts the balance the other way (same goes for microsoft), people will take this into account as well. This is how humans operate, and it makes plenty of sense.
I imagine you do the same wit
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I really don't get this, Google must have some of the best marketing dudes in the world when everyone thinks they smell like a rose, when they're in the business of making money through profiling people. They're collecting information on people by what they search for, the emails they send and receive, if you use Google desktop search they're collecting information off your PC and thanks to Google analytics and it's very very wide adoption (view source and search for urchintracke
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Huh? Google has a search engine, but they are an advertising company. I don't think anybody makes substantive money just doing search engines.
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And if it was Mark Foley asking for a beer, instead of Cameron Diaz...
People give Google the benefit of the doubt, while they give the opposite to Microsoft, because both companies have earned it, based on their past actions. There's nothing wrong with that, at all. In fact, completely IGNORING Microsoft's history would be wrong...
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> the corporation's every request without as much as a wimper.
_Some_ users obey...
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Google is far worse (Score:3, Insightful)
Google is at least several orders of magnitude more evil than Microsoft, the only difference is PR.
Brin and Page started immediately with the Orwellian doublespeak. Like the US government naming their War Department the Department of Defense, they make their motto "Don't be evil", while doing all manner of evil things. They record everything you've ever searched on, your emails on gmail, they know who your friends are, they actively hire and work with the
Future direction? (Score:2)
What is the hoohah about? (Score:4, Informative)
Yes - Google Earth is nothing without the data. That's why they pay huge sums of money for that data. They intend to make a return on this investment - and I'm sure anybody with Google shares would expect them to do so.
To make a return they want people to use it. To get more people to use it they developed an API - the usage of which they intend to ultimately bring money back to Google with.
Why on earth would they want other people ripping off the data they paid to license to do other stuff with - something that doesn't return them money. More importantly, whoever is licensing them the data isn't going to be too happy that other people are copying it without paying them a license fee. If I wrote some software and sold copies to people, and one of my customers started burning copies and giving them out to everybody, I would be pissed off with that customer.
If Gaia wants to use the maps, I'm sure the OSS community will collectively reach into their pockets to pay for the licensing fee required (that would be the fee required to distribute those maps free, to anybody). Alternatively, why don't we send up an OSS satellite ourselves and take our own photos?
I fail to see how this is a story..
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Nothing here to get remotely excited about.
Dumb asses start visualization project without data to visualize. News at 11.
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More amazingly, the Gaia people understood Google's reasoning and complied, even though that meant canning many hours of work.
Please note that it is not an open-and-shut case here that what Gaia was doing was illegal, only detrimental to Google.
Intelligence at work is something worth telling sometime.
Open Dependencies (Score:5, Insightful)
Though that would encourage a good project (if Gaia is one) to grow the popularity of other data sources that compete with Google. So Google would probably go along with it.
Including tiered architectures with choices for alternative components and data in standard formats is a powerful way to force even a powerful force like Google to go with the flow.
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To clarify, we have not asked the Gaia authors to stop developing the program, only to stop accessing Google Earths database. Once the author has pulled the GE download code, he is free to retarget it to say the NASA World Wind imagery and carry on, we have no problems with that.
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* Internal function to authenticate at Google server
*
* Mimics Google Earth's behavior (and uses data actually copypasted
* from tcpdump) - does two HTTP requests and awaits second one to
* contain 80 byte session ID. This SID is stored in gefetch handle
* and used in later requests, giving access to imagery and other data.
*/
However, the 'authent
Google apologists? WTF (Score:3, Insightful)
After reading several posts, more people are standing up to defend Google and their control of their IP. That is fine, but if the article was about MS or another 'evil' corporate company doing this, we would see 1000 posts by now telling the world how evil they are.
What surprises me, is when I see the same people decry Microsoft or IBM and then in related issues stick up for companies like Google and Apple. These companies are all out for their own interest, give back only what 'little' they 'have' to give back and don't give a crap about OSS.
If you look back at tons of articles, where Apple stops giving back source, closes Darwin, or straps on tons of DRM and closes their entire media business to just themselves; or articles where Google admits to data mining email and has some 'unknown-unholy' alliance to firefox that controls the development of the browser and people just roll over like these are all ok things and people still think these companies are good and all about being Open.
Google is not any better than any other corporate machine, and as they get bigger their weight will be felt more and more by the entire industry.
Google is not about cute kittens any more than MS is about cute kittens.
Ok?
I feel so dirty now... (Score:4, Funny)
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=cute+kitten
cute kittensPage 1 of 1,631,025 results
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&i
Results 1 - 10 of about 2,120,000 for cute kittens
that means google is about 25% more cute kittens.
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But isn't the cranky cat shooter now vice president?
How is this violating the license? (Score:2, Insightful)
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the burner has multiple uses. the Gaia API only one. "providing the means" was suffiencient to sink Napster.
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Google handled it well (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm impressed.
From TFA... (Score:5, Informative)
In other words, they got a license for the images, data, whatever only for use in their software. The original providers of that data would - understandably - be unhappy if they allowed the data to be used by other products (remember, they want to keep selling the data to people). So Google has to be the "bad guy" and pull the plug from the 3rd party devs or the data providers will sue them for allowing others to take the data and/or pull the plug on Google's license.
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Gosh, I hope that no one who published the books Google wants to put online made a similar agreement with anyone.
Fundamental misunderstanding (Score:2, Insightful)
"Anything you publish, I can use. In return, anything I publish, you can use".
for example, I make my website accessible to googlebot without restriction (including indexing, caching etc). In return, google is available to me. It's simply about fairness: the "price of entry to the Internet" is that one should contribute one's own material.
This is how, for example, people share html layouts. The unfortunate thing
Evil (Score:2)
2: Anything holding back Open Source is Evil.
3: Anything involving big corporations against the little guy just trying to make the world a better place is Evil.
That's Three Strikes, Google.
Gaia's speed, and FreeBSD too (Score:3, Informative)
I have google earth installed on a windows box and play with it from time to time. But (granted that box is older and more limited than the FreeBSD box -- though it does have a much better video card in it) it runs pretty distressing slow... chews up the system resources. Gaia on my freebsd box was *fast*. Amazingly fast. And therefore fun! Sure I didn't have any UI to speak of, could not look up addresses or landmarks... but i was soon zooming in to any place i was interested in and finding my own way around, and having more fun doing it in the fast minimal interface than I ever had in google earth.
Also it was so nice to see in native 64 freebsd bits... i don't think I'll ever see Google's offerings come to my platform of choice
Alas, the very next day I see the news about the take down....
Sigh.
Mirror, Mirror on the wall... (Score:2)
Guys... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Do very little evil? (Score:4, Insightful)
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If evil is even mentioned, I think we need to examine the enitre story a little bit more before throwing names around.
We are all guilty of sin. (Score:2)
I suppose Google shouldn't except cash either since it's the "root of all evil". OTOH: Trying to conform to everyone else's conflicting definitions of "evil", will in turn cast evil on their shareholders bank accounts and retirement funds.
"Do no evil" is a slogan that represents the founders ideals, it is not and has never been, a business plan! How many mega-corp "m
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Re:Do very little evil? (Score:5, Insightful)
If Digitalglobe (who are the providers of Google's content on google earth [digitalglobe.com]) decided Google were breaching their TOS and decided they'd be better off keeping their imaging to themselves then everyone loses, including anyone using local.google.com and Google Earth.
Seems to me that Google are trying to keep a good thing going, and being IMHO reasonably respectful towards the Gaia project's authors.
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Sounds silly but I'm getting this general drift from a lot of replies that I have read. I'm wondering what,-if anything would be different if google owned the content as well as everything onvolved with providing it so no third party had a say in it. If the above was true, Would this automaticly make google EVIL now? And would that be because they didn't give something away or because the way they didn't giv
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Re:Do very little evil? (Score:5, Insightful)
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To be blunt you have wonderful people skills, and know how to get your point across well without putting someone off side.
Google is simply being faithful to prior contractual agreements.
Well it's not clear to me that GAIA clearly violated Google's terms. If they weren't Google's terms, a cease and desist (which by the way is usually drafted by company lawyers) isn't so benign. All that work GAIA did goes down the tube because they didn't look into terms and
Re:Do very little evil? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's hard to say. Certainly there would be more innovation if anyone was allowed to use the data of these images willy-nilly, but would the images themselves ever have existed?
Say I want to map out my hometown using aerial geography. That's a fairly large undertaking, requiring a plane, probably multiple camera, and almost certainly multiple passes over the area. If I'm expected pay for the costs of acquiring those photos, but I can't expect to even break even (because someone can take my data and release it for free), then I have less incentive to spend the money required to acquire the data. We don't get innovation on the use of this data until such time as the data is acquired, and that can be a costly venture.
In the case of books, it's even darker. The only material value a fiction book has is in the paper it's printed on (or the cost of bandwidth, if I release it online). Other than that, any initial investment comes strictly at an opportunity cost (my time). The entire value of the book is wrapped up in its IP, because copies have a trivial cost (compare to 200 years ago, when printing books had a significant cost). To me, this means that intellectual property laws are even more important today, though they should be significantly reduced in temporal length. The ease of duplication means that there is virtually no replication cost, and very little distribution costs (given electronic sales). Any sale can be virtually pure profit, meaning the time to make up the opportunity cost of creating the work is reduced.
For movies and music which typically have an up front, material cost, things change a bit, but still largely hold true. I'd guess (pulling the number out of my--well, you know) that 90% of the money that a film will earn is generated within the first 10 years, certainly within the first 20. Before duplication and distribution were so easy, a lot of the earnings would be eaten up in materials. Without those costs, again, it's much easier to make up the initial investment and turn a nice profit in a shorter period of time.
I'd be really ecstatic if there were stricter controls even than we have now--as long as the length of copyright was reduced drastically and keys were escrowed with the government and released at the end of the copyright term.
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A C&D letter is written by t3h lawyerz. It is step one in the process of suing someone, since Judges like to see that you asked 'em to stop before suing.
I guess what you meant was that Google had its lawyers write a gently worded C&D.
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It'd be quite funny to see too.
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The funny thing is that the license for live.local (aka Virtual Earth) from Microsoft is much more liberal than Google's maps. IANAL, but I understand that MS' maps and sat-image material can even be used for commercial applications.
What is of course interesting, is that also Microsoft doesn't have satellites flying around the globe and is probably dependent on the same content providers as Google. Maybe MS has better negotiation skills, when it
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Re:Do very little evil? (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't get the objection here. Google gives this stuff away including an API. Open API's were unheard of until Google came around. Somehow, the providers agreed to that as well. That's not enough? They should also become a conduit for everyone that wants to use Google's licensed data as they please?
This is why I don't write open source software anymore. The expectations of the community often far outweighs what they're entitled to.
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Well, but is it even "evil"?
Obviously, they can't let users spread data Google have licensed under special agreements beyond their control. That would put Google in quite some trouble. There are after all organizations owning the maps you're browsing. If they open sourced all their material, Google would perhaps not have as big trouble allowing this. The Google Maps API is a way for them to let their users re
Re:Do very little evil? (Score:4, Insightful)
Google is being good, not evil, by doing this. Unless you think they were evil to sign the contract, in which case they're being evil if they provide Google Earth at all.
The mistaken assumption is "anyone who takes away my toys must be evil". If you have that assumption, you're not being good, you're just being childish.
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Microsoft on its most-evil day is a thousand times less evil than Monsanto on its better days. And Oracle ain't exactly all puppy farts and unicorn giggles, either.
Re:I immediately deleted my Google Earth (Score:4, Funny)
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But what if... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:But what if... (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Crap, (Score:4, Insightful)
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